


2 A.M.

by skcm



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Alternate Universe - Historical, Art Critic Hux, Body Paint, Choking, Contemporary Art, Face Punching, Insults, M/M, Masturbation, Painter Ren, Painting, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Reagan Era, Rivalry, Shower Sex, Swearing, The Reagan Era only makes them seem MORE indulgent and horrible, They are really just bad people and we all know it, Voyeurism, i swore i wouldn't write paint lube and i meant it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 18:42:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6020863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skcm/pseuds/skcm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're a hack, just like me."</p>
            </blockquote>





	2 A.M.

Studios unwelcome guests when the doorsign reads **DO NOT** and yet there is no privateness but neither are there curtains revealing stonefaced models and marblebodied statues.

There is war, and there is _this_ warring between the painter and his critic.

Ren, nothing. Hux, nothing. Reputation, unfriendly. Prestige, unworthy.

They are immortals in this glimpse of history and the artist casts the first colored splatter as the critic undresses.

 _A momentary lapse in sanity_ , Hux will say one day.

His body does not matter. He is the whole body of art, stillstanding under a fresh blueblack streak that runs from the wall to his shoulder to the cold wall again, and he is beneath a pair of terrible hands.

Pink paint whips across the unlover's stretched canvas shoulders, a brush clattering to the ground, and the pale oilslick spreads in fingered wings and in the dim of sick yellow light is the opposite of heaven.

Ren is the breath of angels in the sky, angels in the snow, still unangelic with no sheets and no heat, the carnage of art between grabby fingers with lust and lust and more and more, seven of the deadliest sins known to man or men.

The indulgence of the scene loses itself past New York powder, past Christmas trees and Rockefellers and on into the new year, one nine eight seven, where and when art is dead, buried, nevermore.

"They're freedom," says the one with no brush but with a touch tortured and timeworn. Mouths, ears.

An almost echo: "There is no freedom." He is red, every inch of him unhappy sunsets.

The artist trails the critic's throat with a smile and with teeth.

"And that was a monstrous cliche," Hux adds. "Your ideas are unformed."

Ren does not reach for him, does not wrap his fingers around the critic's cock, will not give him the validation of being groped by fame embodied.

Hux's chin upturned is landscape and his eyes squint but then the lids recede and he is the wax and wane of the moon, cyclical and tidal, the whole of humanity mobile and mad.

Carnival candy fingers through his hair stick inside and pull harder, too much sugar but too good to crash.

The artist is still clothed and drenched in hideous rainbows.

"Sit down."

Hux sinks onto a stool before a canvas.

"I'll be back."

Ren disappears into another room, one Hux has not yet seen.

"Oh, fuck you."

He stands, leaving an ungodly paintprint behind, and follows to the cramped bathroom where Ren's dirty jeans and sweater are balled in the corner waiting like a hunched predatory animal. He joins the painter under cold water out of sheer defiance.

But he _does_ and _is_ allowed, and as the full intensity of all that angry color on their painted hands, on Hux's whole body, washes down the drain, it's the stunning fire of a raygun when Hux grabs Ren's neck and squeezes, breaths beneath his clenched fingers, ragged nails, the little pale ginger hairs on his knuckles, and the escaping sounds are a little like mourning doves flapping through the air, wistful and discontent. Ren's words crumple.

"There's something about choking someone as insolent as you that's unsatisfying as hell-- as if I'm being uncreative."

Hux's hand falls.

"You are."

"Says the hack." Hux smiles and his teeth are an unpleasant white.

In that moment, Ren remembers teeth are just polished bones. He mirrors the expression. "You're the one writing about me."

"I panned you last week."

"I don't even read those reviews, to be honest. It's cerebral bullshit. You're a bunch of brains with no bodies."

"I'm standing right here. I have fucking _legs_."

They are both so colorless.

"Go back into the other room," says Ren.

"Anything to stop hearing you talk."

Hux lies on the sheetless mattress, coffee stains hidden under him. He notices the randomness of the patterns in the ceiling and he resents them for their unpredictability, for the way his own life settles on the cusp of impulse, and for humanity, always less than the hung stars winking down with their skyhigh notoriety, with their eternity.

The moments drift.

Silent battle ensues when Ren emerges, waist-down clothed and in this way, armed to the teeth before Hux. He sits on a metal chair with no arms and he stares.

"Does it work?" Ren asks.

"Does _what_ fucking work?"

"Your cock, does it work when you're dead below your neck?"

"I didn't come here for this."

"Prove that it works."

Everything rational and logical about Hux relents in a split second, and then it is more than one, more than two, more than three heartpounds that pass as the artist, thoughtnumb, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

A gray cloud surrounds him, a distancing and chilling wall.

Ren grins around his cigarette and smokes it to a stump, his eyes flicking up and down across the body of the man with a dirty mattress between his ass and the concrete floor.

"You're bad at this," the artist says, stamping out the butt on the side of the chair and then flicking it away.

Being on the receiving end of scrutiny does nothing to slow the critic who, for once in his life, is the center of attention and the subject of a bad review.

It drives him fucking crazy and it feels like freedom.

"Bad at _what_?"

"Most things. Writing, performing--"

" _Ugh_. I don't--"

"You can't even jerk off right."

" _Fuck_."

"You can't even do something as simple as that. You're a hack, just like me."

"I'm a hack with a receptive audience, at least."

Hux comes on his own hand, Ren still rapt and now silent.

The painter crosses one leg over the other and lights a fresh cigarette. He smiles. Hux rises, stumbles over, and swings his still-wet, balled hand against Ren's jaw and though he recoils, that shit-eating grin never fades, even when the critic can no longer see it, and there is only the ghost of his anger.

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" Ren calls, but Hux is already back in the shower, bloodrushed and soaring past the ceiling with its cruel designs, past the city pigeons on wires, past everything mundane about feeling alive, and now elsewhere.


End file.
